


take the long way around

by RogerRabbit



Series: find my own way down [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Hurt Carl Grimes, Hurt No Comfort, Independent Carl Grimes, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 06:36:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18773236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RogerRabbit/pseuds/RogerRabbit
Summary: The dead are walking, the city is burning, and nobody picks up Carl from school.It takes two months for Carl's first group to be killed, and six months to realize that he's better off alone anyway.alternate title: how to deal with teen angst in the zombie apocalypse, with a heaping side dish of trauma





	take the long way around

**Author's Note:**

> *rolls up late to the fandom with starbucks* sup 
> 
> me @ me: write a short fic about carl growing up on his own. make it lead up to him meeting negan so you can build a series about it. the first one can be a short prologue
> 
> also me: writes 6k of carl Suffering
> 
> work and series title from 'Oats in the Water' by Ben Howard

It takes two months for Carl’s first group to be killed.

 

They'd run from the school, a total of four students whose parents never picked them up and three teachers with no nearby family to hole up with. They’d first headed for Atlanta, but it quickly became clear that the city was overrun, and whoever was left wouldn’t have survived the bomb.

 

(Carl thinks of his father that night, laying in a hospital bed, and cries into his already tattered backpack.)

 

They’d circled the city, skirting the perimeter and searching for other survivors. They’d run into a group of five on the way, students from Georgia State who’d made it out of Atlanta before it was overrun.

 

The twelve of them made camp to the East of the city, nestled in a clearing in the middle of a heavily wooded area. Mrs. Haggerty, a thin woman with a kind face, pulled the kids aside on their third day there and taught him one of the most important lessons of the apocalypse—when you’re too small to fight, you run. When you’re in a wooded area like their camp, you _climb_.

 

The group had three guns, a bag of kitchen knives, and not nearly enough ammo to teach the kids to shoot. Or enough to defend themselves against the horde that attacks a few months after they’d settled in.

 

Carl is frozen as he watches a walker rip into his classmate’s stomach, the sound of the kid’s screams mixing with the screams from others around the camp. Something pushes him back against a tree and he is too stunned to do anything but climb as Ms. Haggarty pushes him up a tree, and her screams join the others as soon as Carl gets some even footing on the branches. Carl looks down, sees dead hands reaching for him, and climbs higher.

 

He stays in the tree long after the screaming stops, after even the moaning dead have moved on, seeming to follow the direction of a helicopter that passed overhead. Carl barely pays mind to that, instead descending carefully from the tree as his parched lips lead him to the water bottles on the forest floor.

 

On the ground, he is met by the crunch of his feet on dead grass, then silence. There are only two bodies left in the clearing. One small, and torn apart beyond the point of reanimation. The other is the top half of Ms. Haggarty, crawling weakly towards Carl.

 

He would throw up if there was anything left in his stomach.

 

Carl tramples the blood-stained soil on the way to the cooler, and tries to hold himself back from drinking the whole bottle too quickly. One of the first survival rules the group had taught him. Feeling somehow horrified while simultaneity numb, he fills a bag with water and food, grabs three guns from the ground and the weapons bag from where it sat, untouched. The walkers had hit too fast for anyone to even grab another weapon.

 

A groan sounds from his right and he turns, meeting the dead eyes of his teacher. She tries to crawl towards him, but one of her arms had been torn off at the shoulder. Her jaw hangs loosely from her face, and her hair had been torn out in chunks.

 

Carl throws up the water he’d just drank.

 

What used to be Mrs. Haggerty digs its broken fingers into the ground and Carl stares for another long moment. He remembers all the kind words she’d said to him, how she’d held him while he cried for his family, for his friends, for the life that he had lost. He sees the corpse attempting to crawl, pathetically, on the forest floor. He sets his jaw, pulls a knife from the bag, and walks towards it.

 

This is the first time Carl kills a walker. It is nothing close to the last.

 

**

 

Living with teachers for the first two months of the end of the world had its benefits.

 

The syllabus may have changed, but they continued to teach.

 

Mrs. Haggerty taught the kids how to be run, hide, cook and eat in the new world.

 

Ms. Hernandez taught them to fight, passing along lessons she’d learned from local karate and self defense classes.

 

Mr. Smythe taught them to hunt, how to sneak up light-footed on prey and how to prepare them to be eaten afterwards. Without firing the guns, he taught them where the safety was, how to aim down the site, and never to aim at another living person.

 

(Christine, a girl not much taller than Carl, had pulled the kids aside at camp one day, one at a time, and told him about how cruel people can be. How not everyone can be trusted. How a group of grown men could be more dangerous to people like him and people like her than the walkers. He didn’t understand much, but he nodded along like he did. Her serious expression and the way she cupped his cheek gently and passed a dagger into his small hand before moving on to tell the next kid. She made him promise to follow her advice.)

 

When Carl is left alone, he is as prepared as he can be. He is also twelve years old, with skinny legs, and knobby knees, and nobody had prepared him for surviving on his own.

 

**

 

He climbs a tree at the side of the road, carries his bags up with him, and settles into an area he can stay for a few days if he needs to. He doesn’t know how many of the dead are nearby to be drawn to the noise he will be making.

 

Across the road, there is a tree with a patch of bright green moss growing on the trunk.  Carl aims the pistol at it, pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. He looks again, switches the safety off. Aims. Fires.

 

Rinse. Repeat. Improve.

 

**

 

Mr. Smythe’s compass leads him back to where it started. Kings County.

 

His home is almost empty. His parents’ room is cleared. All of the photos are taken from the home, only empty frames left behind, shattered on the floor. He collects some clothes from his room, stuffs them in his bag.

 

Carl leaves the home, sparing it one last glance from the street corner, and walks away. He climbs to the top of a building, shoots out the front doors of the café. Walkers pour out the doors and down the street, towards the source of the gunshot, while Carl hops down from the roof and sneaks around the backs of buildings to sneak in through the same door he had broken.

 

There is one walker left inside the café. He jams a knife in its skull before it can grab his foot, grabs the photo he came for, and leaves.

 

**

 

He manages two more weeks on his own, most of the time spent hidden amongst the treetops.

 

He watches as the dead wander around below him as he sits, eating canned meat and handfuls of nuts. Until he starts to run out of food.

 

Back at camp, the college students usually went on any supply runs while the kids had always stayed back. Carl figured it would be similar to taking the photo from the café, but his group had always come back with horror stories of walkers hiding amongst the shelves, and passing some shops that were so overrun they didn’t even try to enter.

 

It doesn’t matter how unprepared he is, though. He needs food.

 

He walks along the side of the road, sticking to the treeline so he could get away quick if need be. It is there that he meets the next group that he would stick with for a while.

 

He is crouched by the side of the road, trying to make sense of the map that Ms. Hernandez had in her car before they’d taken off, when he hears the crunch of gravel down the road, the same direction he’d been coming from. He watches as they approach, not noticing him as he lays flat on the grass. Living people, for the first time in weeks. Three men and two women. A little girl, a bit younger than Carl, walked with them. They looked tired, but content.

 

Carl weighs his option. He considers how large their bags are, how none look dehydrated or particularly hungry.

 

He calls out before he stood, ensuring they wouldn’t think he was a walker.

 

He eats well that night.

 

**

 

The next supply run the group goes on, Carl joins them.

 

Rinse. Repeat. Improve.

 

**

 

Two of the men in this group are army veterans, and they last longer than Carl’s first group.

 

They never stop for long, and head towards Bethesda, Maryland, where one of the men has family with a kitted out underground bunker.

 

A few months down the road, while the group has a temporary camp is set up a mile from the main road, one of the veterans leads Carl to a truck and teaches him to drive.  

 

“Age doesn’t mean anything anymore. If you end up alone again, you need to know some adult shit.”

 

They practice hotwiring as they continue down the freeway, but never drive for long stretches. Cars are too loud, to unpredictable, he was told. That and the frequent road blocks set up along the road meant they walked a lot more than they drove.

 

Carl travelled with them, and Carl learned how to survive.

 

**

 

Two of them die in Virginia.

 

The freeway they’d been following cuts through the city and they tried to skirt it, but a large horde meets them on one of the side roads.

 

Carl looks to the farm houses that litter the roadside. No trees thick enough to provide good cover. The houses too far from the road to make it to without being noticed.

 

They hide in cars. Charlotte, ten years old and the only member of the group to have never killed a walker, sobs as she curled up in the backseat of a four-door. Screams as the windows break from too many of the dead pressing against them.

 

Carl is laying in the covered back of a truck, and hears it all. Doug, who taught him to drive, is beside him. Doug, who is Charlotte’s father in all but blood.

 

Carl hears the walkers, sees them pass through the thin slit of light along the perimeter of the truck bed. No doubt they’re gathering around Charlotte’s body. If they linger, they will catch the scent of the rest of the group. Someone else has realized this.

 

Carl hears screaming again, this time further down the road. The shadows begin to move on faster. The screams continue, taking on words. Taunting the dead. Leading them further up the road. Carl recognized the voice of Raegen, Charlotte’s mother. The dead keep moving. A streak of light cuts into the truck-bed and Carl can see Doug’s face, beside him, looking haunted.

 

When they emerge hours later, when there are no more sounds of the moaning dead, Carl can see a grotesque pile of red up the road, in the direction they’d come from. The direction of Raegen’s screams.

 

Carl puts down what remains of Charlotte before she can wake up. They move on.

 

**

 

The bunker is a partial bust. The doors are wide open when they arrive, a walker stumbling around inside, skirting around the body of Tony’s mother. There is blood on her teeth, and a bite on her shoulder. There is a bullet between her eyes. The bunker has been emptied of food.

 

Tony joins Doug in a brief emotional shut down while the others clear the bunker of the rot, ensure the door still closes properly, and begin scouting the area for food to stock up on. Tony moves on, joins them. Two weeks after arriving, there is enough food and water to sustain the group for at a while.

 

One month after arriving, Carl is the only one left in the bunker.

 

(He and Emily arrive back to find the door open. Tony lying headfirst on the floor in a pool of blood. Bill’s body is sprawled across the stairs. Doug sits in the corner alone, and Carl recognizes the look on his face as the same one he’d had in the truck bed. Recognizes what it means. Emily does not, and she approached the man quickly to check on him. Carl does not have time to call a warning before she is shot in the gut by the gun Doug has concealed in his lap. Doug raises the gun again, but Carl is faster.

 

Emily dies in his arms. As she chokes on her own blood, she puts Carl’s gun, still clutched tightly in his palm, to her own head.

 

It is the first time Carl kills a person.

 

He buries three of them together, side by side in a large hole. He drags Doug’s body to the forest edge, and leaves it for the walkers.)

 

**

 

Bill had noticed, their first day in the bunker, that the latches on the doors were weak. The door would close, but the lock could be pried open. He said he would repair it when they had the time. He never had the time. Carl stares at the latch and is convinced he will just make it worse if he tries.

 

Carl knows the bunker is safe from the dead if the door is closed, but he is wearier of the people who could pull the door open with enough force. He considers leaving, but has nowhere else to go. Everyone he knows is dead, and he is only familiar with the areas he has already scavenged. He must focus on staying alive, and he needs a roof and four walls to do that.

 

So, he stays. Cleans the blood from the floor, continues to scavenge for food and supplies. In a clearing not far from the bunker, he plants seeds collected from a nearby gardening store. It is completely trial and error as to what will grow in the harsh weather, but he makes do.

 

Two weeks into solitude, he curls up on his bed in the bunker, staring at the empty bunk above him, and feels lonely and out of his depth.

 

He closes his eyes to sleep, and dreams of blue eyes, long brown hair, and warm arms wrapped around him.

 

**

 

He covers the door to the bunker with foliage after he returns one day and finds most of his food missing. He is thankful that the door lies almost flat on the ground, and is easy to cover with logs when he leaves. While ducking inside, he pulls a tangle of leaves and sticks over the door as he closes it behind him.

 

The stairs down are lined with strings of empty cans, plentiful enough for the noise to alert him if anyone trips on them, or tries to move them out of the way.

 

(Later, he reflects that he should have just set up a rifle to fire at any intruders if the door was opened.)

 

**

 

The bunker is not close to many stores, and he runs out of food after a few months alone. He begins venturing further, usually by bike and on foot. Car engines are loud, and he does not want to risk finding a herd only to draw them back to his makeshift home.

 

On his third trip to a nearby town, he spends the night amongst the treetops after clearing a convenience store had taken longer than expected. He is drifting to sleep, backpack tied securely to a branch beside him, when he hears a not-so-distant scream.

 

It is not a moan, grown or angry screech. Someone is alive, and they—she?—is screaming.

 

Carl adjusts his position, crouching on his branch near the trunk, ready to hop to the ground.

 

(Should he help? The scream sounded scared, or pained, and what if there are walkers and he is killed while trying to help? What if she is from the group that broke into the bunker months ago, and will want more of his food now? What if—?)

 

His revelry is broken by the crunch of branches. She is closer, now. He can see the top of her head—blonde, matted with blood or dirt—through a break in the branches.

 

She is no longer screaming unintelligible yells, now he can hear words clearly. She is yelling for help, and Carl readies himself to jump down and do just that, when three men break through the trees and into his sightline.

 

Carl sees the smiles stretched wide across their faces, sees the coordinated way they’re walking, and it only takes a moment for him to realize they aren’t walkers. Carl’s knuckles are white around the handle of his dagger. The men form a semi-circle around the woman. One of them is laughing.

 

A different man grabs the woman by the arm, shoves her down and climbs on top of her like a walker about to rip open his human prey.

 

Carl does not understand what’s happening.

 

(His first is white around the handle of his dagger, and the memories of Christine’s advice rush through his mind. Warnings about groups of men.)

 

He does understand that he has no chance of taking these men out—he wouldn’t have the element of surprise if they heard him knocking branches out of the way on his way down. Here and now, tucked between branches, he is safe. Unseen.

 

He wants to help this woman, but—he will not put himself at risk. Helping a stranger is not worth his own life.

 

The other two men get closer, and the screaming gets impossibly louder.

 

Carl averts his eyes and looks to the sky. He tries not to move, or to breath. The night passes in a flurry of screaming, crying, jeers and laughter.

 

Carl does not sleep.

 

In the morning, he descends to the silence below. The men are gone. The woman’s body lays naked on the forest floor, her head lying meters away. Her teeth are gnashing the empty air.

 

Carl considers putting her down, and considers what may happen if the men come back and realize that someone else had been in the area.  

 

He leaves, and makes it back to the bunker in record time. Ties the door to the inside wall using a thick rope.

 

(Carl understands what had happened. He understands Christine’s warnings.)

 

**

 

A year passes in a predictable routine.

 

Carl wakes up at sunrise, having established his internal alarm within months of the journey from Georgia.

 

He uses the skills he learned along the way. Works out in the bunker on days he spends there, doing pull-ups on the thick shelving, push-ups on the hard floor, dips with his body suspended from a chair to a shelving unit. He tries to go out every few days, even when he doesn’t need more supplies, to exercise his legs and develop a rough map of the area.

 

He keeps his shelves as stocked as possible, steals medicine and bandages when he can. He is almost out of gas canisters for the grill, and eats things cold when he can. He knows that if the bunker is overrun, he will have to relocate and fast, so he has spent months hiding caches of supplies in various buildings and tree trunks throughout the area.

 

Carl knows that he will have to move soon—or find a car big enough to make longer trips, to places further from the bunker. The supplies within any easily reachable distance are gone, most taken by him, some taken by—others.

 

He has not seen another group since that night a year ago, but he has seen untouched storefronts, ones that he’d planned to raid later, become empty before he could fulfil his plan. There are others in the area, and they’d been getting more active lately.

 

(He thinks of others, hears the echo of a cruel laugh, and ties a second rope around the bunker door to keep it shut a bit tighter.)

 

Carl is asleep in his cot, exhausted from holding out a large crowd of walkers outside of a corner store, when his carefully constructed life falls apart.

 

He wakes with a start, rapidly blinks sleep out of eyes as he registered the sound that woke him. There are muffled voices from outside the bunker, and a loud metallic creaking echoing within. He grabs the handgun that lies beside his bed, jumps to his feet and rushes to the bottom of the stairs, where he looks up to see moonlight pooling in through a crack in the door, and two sets of fingers wrapped around the door’s perimeter.

 

The creaking noise is from the railing, breaking as the ropes tied to it are pulled tight.

 

Someone is breaking into the bunker.

 

Carl freezes in place, gun clutched to his side, and can only stare in a panicked shock as the railing dislodges from the wall, coming free completely as the door swings wide open.

 

Three men stand at the top of the stairs, staring down at him. Carl has not seen another living person in a year.

 

He raises his gun, fires. Someone cries out, and the others fly down the stairs and tackle him to the ground before he can get another shot off.

 

The gun clatters into the corner, his cheek is pressed against the floor, and a knee is pressed to the center of his back. His ears are full of fuzz; all he can hear is his own rapid heartbeat. There are people around him; he feels something on his head and realizes that a hand is fisted in his hair. He tunes back in.

 

“—lookin’ for whoever else was stealin’ shit around here, didn’t think it was a skinny little piece all alone.”

 

“I—I—“ Carl has not spoken in over a year. It’s a startling revelation honed by how rough his voice comes out, “Not alone. Group’s coming back soon, I—“

 

“Ah, ah, ah,” The voice above him tuts. The grip on his hair tightens. “Only one bed with sheets on it, door locked up tight? Nah, you’re all alone.”

 

“Trigger finger little bitch,” This voice is deeper, and comes from his right side. He turns his head to the best of his ability, sees a man clutching his upper arm with red blooming from between his fingers. There is a sudden pain in his side, and it takes another moment for Carl to register that the man had kicked him in the stomach.

 

Carl realizes that he is hyperventilating only moments before he blacks out, his chest pressed to the concrete floor.

 

He does not know how much time passes until he comes to with his face pressed against his own mattress. There is still a weight against his back, and after a moment, a hand returns to grip his hair. The man’s other hand moves lower, and grips just as tightly.

 

He screams until his voice is ragged to make noise, and laughter echoes throughout the bunker.

 

**

 

Carl wakes hours later, alone and hurting in ways he didn’t know was possible.

 

He is lying in the corner, wearing only a thin t-shirt that is more stained and ripped than it was he was awake last. He can hear snoring from his left. All of the lights in the bunker are turned off, but he knows the layout like the back of his hand.

 

He does not pause, does not think. He runs for the stairs.

 

Trips over a wire at the base of the stairs. He scrambles up the stairs anyway. He can hear movement behind him.

 

The men are awake, and they are coming after him.

 

They’ve clumsily re-tied the rope to the remaining railing, but it is not tight enough to keep it sealed. He shoves the door open, slips through the gap from when the rope catches. Sprints for the woods.

 

(He can feel the damp grass beneath his bare feet, feel the dry skin of tear tracks on his cheeks, feel the midnight breeze brushing his bare skin, feel leftover pain coursing through his body. He wishes that he could feel nothing at all.)

 

There is yelling and jeering coming from behind him, closer now. Carl is in shape, he is fast, but he is exhausted and has much shorter legs than the men following him. He realized that they will catch him within minutes if he doesn’t do something to stop them.

 

He sets one barefoot on a fallen log, and uses it to propel him forward and up, towards the trunk of a large tree. His hands scramble for somewhere to hold, and just manages to grasp a short branch before the men are on him. He hoists himself up, lifts a leg to catch the next branch.

 

A hand catches his ankle and tugs, sudden and strong.

 

Thick arms wrap around his waist, and another set of hands grab his legs when he starts kicking out.  His screams echo through the forest, but he does not care about the possibility of walkers following the noise. There are more immediate threats to worry about.

 

They carry him back to the bunker, down the stairs, and use the rope from the door to tie his hands behind his back. Carl’s mind is running too fast for him to process any of this though, all that matters to him is panicking, fighting back, run _run run run_.

 

He barely registers that he is back on the mattress, lying on his back with one of the men holding him down by the shoulders.

 

He does register when there is a sharp pain on his cheek. One man, the one Carl had shot, looks somewhere between amused and furious.

 

“Who the fuck do you think you are, you little bitch?” The knife digs into his cheek, inching up his face. “You shoot me, then try to run? Fuck no. We were planning on treatin’ you real good, too. But you gotta learn, kiddo. You make us feel good, we make you feel good. You fuck us over, we fuck you over. Eye for an eye, sweetheart.”

 

The knife inches up above his cheek, and digs in deep.

 

Carl’s screams go silent sooner than the night before, his voice still exhausted from his cries.

 

**

 

A week passes.

 

Carl is not allowed to leave the bunker.

 

He barely leaves the mattress, and his wrists are chafed from the rope that continues to ties them.

 

His pillow is stained red, and the moisture from it has stained and knotted his hair.

 

On the floor beside him, there is a rotting red pile of flesh. The men leave it there as a reminder. (As if the hole in Carl’s face is not enough of a reminder of what they’d done.)

 

Carl still does not know their names. It feels like all he knows is pain. Pain in his skull, pain around his wrists, pain on his neck and hips where his skin is layered with finger-shaped bruises, and pain worse than anything else in places he does not want to think about.

 

Carl tries not to think about any of this, and sets his thoughts on the most important thing to him: that the rope remains around his wrists. The men don’t remove it, don’t change it, and _don’t tighten the rope_.

 

A week passes before it is loose enough for him to slip it off of his wrists.

 

It must be night when he does it, because all of the men are asleep. Carl slips carefully off of the mattress, wincing as he goes and consequently biting back a gasp as it pulls at the exposed muscles on the right side of his face.

 

He snatches his clothes from the shelf where they had been unceremoniously tossed and pulls them on as quickly as he can while staying silent. While he does this, he keeps his eyes trained on the men.

 

Once dressed, he calmly tucks his favourite Beretta into his waistband.

 

He could leave now, hop in a car and drive far and fast. The men would not wake until he was too far for them to catch, or—

 

_Or._

Carl is fourteen years old, he is hurt, he is tired, and he wants nothing more than to curl up somewhere safe and cry for the first time in recent memory.

 

Carl is also hardened from the short life he has lived in a world surrounded by the undead, and his exhaustion is nothing compared to the hot anger bubbling in his stomach, the need to take something from these men who have taken so much from him.

 

There is a thick-handled bowie knife sitting innocuously on the shelf, still stained with Carl’s blood.

 

Over a year of putting down walkers has taught him the softest spots in the skull, where it is easiest to stab and put them down.

 

He puts this knowledge to use as he slides the bowie knife through one man’s temple. The only sound in the room is a quiet crack, and the drip of blood dripping to the floor. The second man is just as simple to end.

 

The last man is the one he had already shot once, the one who had only days before held the same knife that Carl is holding.

 

_An eye for an eye._

 

The phrase echoes through Carl’s mind as he grits his teeth and holds the knife less than an inch above the man’s closed eye. He prepares to dig the knife in, and—

 

The man’s eyes snap open, and he lunges forward. Right into the knife.

 

Carl yelps and flies back, puling the knife back with him. The man is yelling, clutching the bleeding side of his face. He stands quickly and stumbles immediately. Looks up at Carl for only a moment before lunging towards him.

 

Carl cries out again as he is shoved to the hard concrete floor, the knife tumbling from his hand. A heavy weight is holding him down, and the man’s blood is dripping onto his own face. Through the man’s tattered white shirt, he can see a circle of red spreading from the bullet wound that must have reopened with the sharp movements. He has hurt this man before, twice now. He has killed both other men. He is so close to being safe, he just needs to—need too—

 

One of Carl’s hands is pinned down. The other comes up to the other man’s face, and he digs his fingers into the gaping wound that is the man’s eye. The large man cries out and falls back, once again clutching his head.

 

Carl jumps to his feet, takes the stairs two at a time, and _runs_.

 

**

 

The still gaping wound on Carl’s face is bleeding. He can feel it pooling at the base of his throat, but he leaves it be. He is already covered in blood; a bit more won’t make the difference between attracting walkers or not. He is far from the bunker, running towards a strip mall he’d cleared out weeks ago. There is a small stash of weapons and food stuffed into the wall tiles behind a filing cabinet.

 

The man, if following, would not be far behind. He could have taken any number of weapons from the bunker with him, and Carl has only a pistol with limited bullets until then.

 

The strip mall is visible through the trees, and his lip quirks upwards when he realizes that he can _definitely_ make it to his stash before the man reaches him, even if he is right on Carl’s heels.

 

That excited certainty, paired with days of starvations and dehydration, is what makes him miss the three new trucks parked next to one of the buildings.

 

He runs as fast as his legs can carry him to the building where his pack is hidden, one of the few buildings in the mall with the door still standing—in a plaza with a grocery store, camping supplies and clothing stores, nobody gave a second thought to a travel booking agency. He stops so suddenly that gravel goes flying from the friction of his worn out sneakers, tears the door open, and—

 

Freezes.

 

There are six men standing in the room, lounging in office chairs and, now, staring at Carl. Who is standing in the doorway. Staring back at them.

 

Two of the men are aiming guns at him.

 

The only man who is standing, leaning forward onto a desk, opens his mouth to speak.

 

Carl is tackled from the side before a word can be said.

 

His elbows hit the gravel first, forcing a sharp cry from his throat as a heavy weight covered his own. His hands went up on instinct, but did not manage to stop the man from digging a thin blade into the flesh below his shoulder. Carl gritted his teeth as hard as possible to stop himself from crying out, and raised his knees, small and sharp, to jab at the body above him. The man grunts but does not move otherwise, and Carl feels a sudden pain in his abdomen where the man’s first connects.

 

All that Carl can feel is panic, and the almost-certainty that he is going to die.

 

He feels a light brush of fingers on his throat before a crunch sounds in the air, and the weight is gone from on top of him.

 

He does not think before he moves, he has no time. He snatches his pistol off of the ground where it had landed when he fell, aims, fires.

 

Three rounds enter the man’s head before the gun starts to click.

 

The shots are so condensed, so close together, than the three shots appeared to have made one large hole in the man’s forehead, with the black charring of gunpowder visible around the wound. It isn’t enough.

 

Carl drops to his knees to reach the man’s face, clutches the empty gun tight with the butt of the gun angled at the man’s face, and lunges.

 

And again.

 

And again.

 

Carl’s face is covered in red when he is done, and there are white chips of bone ground into the pavement.

 

He leans back on his knees, takes a deep breath, and looks up. Meets the eyes of the same man who had almost spoken before. He is now holding a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, and there is a dark red stain adorning one side.

 

“Well shit, kid.” The man’s voice is low but clear, and Carl’s first thought is that he somehow has enough water to keep his throat clear. “Here I was, in the mood to smash some skulls, and you do it before I can manage.”

 

Carl leans back and start to stand up, opening his mouth to speak. He straightens his back, and—looks down. There is a knife sticking out of his stomach.

 

There’s a split-second where he looks at the man, sees an odd expression of his face—confusion? Concern?—before the ground rushes up to meet him and the world goes black.

 

*

 

(Later, Carl will wake up in the whitest room he’s seen since the end of the world began.)

 

(Later, Carl will officially meet Negan, who will welcome him to the Sanctuary.)

 

(Later, Carl will stand at Negan’s side during each meeting, and Negan’s hand will be a comforting weight on his shoulder.)

 

(Later, Carl will look out of the window of an RV and see a line of people kneeling on the cold ground.)

 

( _But that comes later._ )

**Author's Note:**

> remember angry season 3-4 carl who was super sick of people treating him like a kid and also a bit of a sociopath??? and season 4 ends with us all wondering where he’d go from there and how he’d deal with all the trauma???? how season 4 ended with him in a dark place and full of flashbacks and wondering how rick would deal with his son’s descent into some dark shit??? (then nothing came of it at all!!! and season 5 started with carl super gung-ho about helping people!!! which he then died doing!!!!) yeah good times a+ character development 
> 
> ps: I stretched out the timeline because the ‘’’’canon’’’’’ timelines makes no sense 
> 
> pps: yes this is the first work in a series where negan basically raises carl and they will have a sort of dark father/son relationship

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [From Whence we Came](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21032846) by [AtlasNerd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtlasNerd/pseuds/AtlasNerd)




End file.
